Abused

[Donatien]

I will be back.

My favourite wit, Sydney Smith once said “I like him and his wife; he is so ladylike; and she's such a perfect gentleman”, which is only funny because of its inversion of the perceived differences between our two sexes ( hurrah for them!!), which observation of our great ape cousins confirms as not just a socially engineered construct; but in fact genetically engineered instinct.

Gary, has I think correctly said that our ( male) fantasies should be for another thread, especially since several of you ladies have had the courage to speak of serious sexual abuse in your pasts, including this threads initiator. And it is this topic that I wish to address.

R/L rape and abuse, outside consensual bdsm, is assault and among its potential, although not invariable consequences are a range of symptoms, best regarded as a type of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which is distinguished by:-

1) The existence of a “psychologically distressing event” that would evoke significant disturbance in almost anyone.

2) Later re-experiencing of the trauma in one's mind for example, through recurring dreams of the stressor, or “flashbacks” ( intrusive sensory memories e.g smells , sounds,etc) to the original traumatic situation.

3) “Numbing of general responsiveness” to avoid the external world, for example, dissociation, withdrawal, restricted affect, or loss of interest in daily events.

4) A wide variety of other reactions or symptoms, such as sleep disturbance, difficulty concentrating, memory problems, irrational guilt, extreme alertness to danger in the environment, and an intensification of symptoms upon exposure to situations that resemble the original event.

Now all of you who have had the misfortune to have experienced abuse, can no doubt recognize how your symptoms fit into these categories, and I shall therefore attempt to explain the mental processes that we use to defend ourselves, and how they work with varying success at the time, but may later, become the barrier to optimal recovery.

Even in the womb, we may experience negative events, in the form of negative emotions picked up from our mothers, and so by birth, we like the ugly duckling may have already come to some
“limiting decision' about the nature of who we are. Once born we are progressively exposed to more and more complex challenges, and the major job of parenting is to provide an ambiance of unconditional love, and guidance that encourages the development of sufficient resources to successfully surmount them all, growing into well grounded adults.

In the real world, many times we find ourselves out of our depth and have to improvise, using those resources we have to deal with what is occurring. Like the hermit crab, we cobble together defenses into a protective shell, which in most of us affords sufficient self confidence to learn the skills we need to pursue our lives.

These defenses, defensive tricks really, the ones that worked successfully at any rate, become so automatic that we are no longer aware of them. Like a hidden piece of software they continue to work “protecting” us as they have always done, only now as ( relatively!) successful adults, they are actually limiting our choices unnecessarily , since although those defenses that we developed when children were the best we could come up with at the time,they are far more primitive, rigid and limiting than responses that we now use regularly in specific aspects of our lives. Indeed they may stick out like a sore thumb, to others if not to ourselves. As the psychiatrist R.D, Laing put it ( get you brain in gear folks):-

-” The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice; and because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little that we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice is shaping our thoughts and deeds”.

Have you noticed that you are feeling great (six foot tall), when the telephone rings. You hear one syllable and suddenly you feel yourself shrinking down to what size? The size you were when you first learned to respond in this possibly submissive or appeasing way (or stroppy ;whatever was you favourite defence then). Notice how our physiology actually remembers time travels us back. Think of the Babushkas the Russian dolls. Is that not how we are, one inside the other, one for each new learning, but all continuing always available, when the appropriate button is pressed.
Now think about these buttons. Who is in charge of them? In respect of most of the earliest and most primitive ones , and especially those developed in response to trauma events, the buttons are pressed by external events automatically.

So I hope you can now understand that many of the defenses we use to get by, are :-
a) past their sell by date, already superseded by other more mature responses that we use in other specific parts of our psyche, and
b) potentially a prison hemming us in and limiting our ability to fulfill our potential

I have deliberately cast my net wide to demonstrate that , not only are the long term effects of abuse best understood as a type of post traumatic stress disorder, but also part of a process of defense building that we all engage in. The problem with primitive defenses against extreme events, is that depending on the resources available to the victim at the time, they may a) only be partially effective at reducing the psychic trauma, and b) the defenses themselves may set up recurring patterns of behaviour that over time become THE problem, being damaging to the quality of life of their practitioner, especially when they have alternative strategies to hand. It is like having loads of problems with a piece of software before discovering you already have on your computer another bit of software that is far better, but you have only been using that one for one specific task.

If what I have written is of some value to you, and you would like me to continue, I shall focus more on solutions, and resolutions, in a Part2 . Meantime I shall just say that in my own view part of the shift to recovery mode is discovering the art of being upset confidently. By which I mean that all these defenses served the purpose of protecting against hurt, at a time when it SEEMED that one would be over whelmed. Later as we have continued to learn, that may well no longer be the case, but the traumatized part of us ( the little one) doesn't know that YET. All effective counselling or psychotherapy or some times life itself, helps the client revisit the past, but WITH THE ADDED RESOURCES of today, the counsellor acting as a travel guide , assisting you to journey around your mind discovering buried treasure, and talents over contextualized.